Say what?!

Tony Jones has responded to the sort of argu­ment I used in my pre­vi­ous reply to him and the response has me scratch­ing my head.  The core of Tony’s response is that first of all, every­thing is rel­a­tive (this isn’t sur­pris­ing). Sec­ond of all that the Bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive as such doesn’t mat­ter. It doesn’t mat­ter that the cre­ation nar­ra­tive only men­tioned the cre­ation of man and woman for each other.... Read More

Response to Tony Jones on Homosexuality

Just over a week ago Tony Jones asked a ques­tion: OK, I’m seri­ous about this. I’m not even being snarky. Really. If you are one who thinks that homo­sex­ual sex is sin­ful, can you please explain to me WHY a gay or les­bian per­son who is in a long-term, monog­a­mous rela­tion­ship would not be able to whole­heart­edly fol­low Christ? My only stip­u­la­tion is this: You may not quote one of the six verses in scrip­ture that... Read More

The Bible, Propaganda?

Speak­ing of The New Chris­tians, Tony Jones said some­thing else that caught my attention: “The Bible is pro­pa­ganda.… Pro­pa­ganda has a point and a pur­pose.… It doesn’t claim to be objec­tive. It’s try­ing to con­vince some­one of some­thing. It’s try­ing to get peo­ple to join a cause, to join a move­ment. Isn’t that exactly what the Bible is?.… It is a liv­ing, breath­ing doc­u­ment that makes a claim on... Read More

The Resurrection?

Lately I’ve been watch­ing and read­ing about the debate sur­round­ing the res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus and the his­toric­ity of such an account. This reminded me of a brief dia­logue Tony Jones pre­sented at the begin­ning of The New Chris­tians. The argu­ment was meant to show the defi­ciency of foun­da­tion­al­ism, how­ever, it con­cerns some­thing that is brought up more often than not in pop­u­lar­ized ‘res­ur­rec­tion... Read More

Truth as a symptom

“The pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with ‘truth’ among emer­gents has often been pushed on them by their con­ser­v­a­tive crit­ics, pri­mar­ily because truth is a cen­tral con­cern of theirs. And their pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with truth is a symp­tom of their mod­ernism. They want the Bible to be unswerv­ingly fac­tual (here, truth equals fact), for if it is, then its claims about eter­nal sal­va­tion can­not be ignored. So they pub­lish... Read More